We like MacAnova because:

1. It's free, we can give it to students to use at home or their labs on Windows, Macintosh or Linux computers.
2. It's reasonably small yet still does what we need it to do. We use it extensively in course work, but also more broadly in applied statistics and research computing.
3. It's extensible via macros.
4. It's reasonably fast.
5. Students can get up and running for simple things with only a few commands.
6. It works well with libraries of named data sets and macros.
7. It is flexible enough and powerful enough to use for research level statistical computing
8. The windowed versions provide easy importing and exporting of data and results via special variable CLIPBOARD so users can enter data in a spreadsheet and do the analysis in MacAnova.

The most frequent complaints about MacAnova:

1. It's not (choose one of SAS, SPSS, SYSTAT, MINITAB, DATADESK, JMP, ... ) or some other widely used commercial program.
2. Even the Windows and Macintosh versions are not really menu driven and thus, to steal a phrase, MacAnova may be said to be user-polite, though perhaps not user-friendly.